The world is a different place now, creating a business environment driven by real time operations and an increased sensitivity to activities in the global marketplace. Companies are reaching beyond their former geographic limitations to explore new challenges and opportunities.
International Outsourcing: Outsourcing: The First Option–Customers considering a move into the international marketplace should rank outsourcing as their number one option to support that growth. That bold statement sums up industry analyst Michael Corbett’s view of the role of outsourcing in the booming global marketplace.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is paving the way for leading companies to compete globally and increase profitability into the new millennium.
International Outsourcing: One of the most important considerations for companies moving into international operations is understanding the conditions in the market they’re entering. That understanding, coupled with some flexibility, can set the stage for enthusiastic acceptance.
Tomorrow’s clients are looking for ways to gain competitive advantage, to increase efficiency, to transform their workforce, and to reach new levels of performance.
The information technology (IT) outsourcing industry was launched by an explosion of rapidly changing technology and companies’ needs to access benefits of that technology at the lowest possible costs. The bottom line was cost containment. Today, that line is a bit blurred. Although cost containment continues to be a major issue, many companies have other goals as their primary reasons to outsource.
Today, enterprises of all sizes want to expand their reach to new customers, to contain or reduce their costs, or to bring new products and services to market more quickly. Increasingly, they are looking to information technology (IT) to help accomplish all these goals.
International outsourcing embraces several common factors: the creation of value, the introduction of concepts, the portability of technology. Then there are the uncommon: language and culture. We’ve heard it over and over again. The supplier community’s biggest concern is getting and retaining qualified people, said Steven Leakey, EDS’ former director of marketing and business development for Asia/Pacific. But it’s an even bigger and more complex concern for the international outsourcing marketplace.
The global marketplace is booming, and companies are responding to the lure of worlds to be conquered. Firms that transact business around the world are striving to reach new and emerging markets domestically and internationally and to operate more efficiently on a global basis. For some of the firms, their efforts to extend their marketing and operational reach beyond their traditional boundaries creates the need for assistance with their infrastructures. Many of them are turning to outsourcing as the bridge to reach their international growth strategies and customer base.
The European Theater is primed and ready for growth in Information Technology (IT) outsourcing. Total European IT outsourcing is estimated at around $15 billion in 1997, and with firms fueled by the need to concentrate on their core competencies, that figure is expected to rise to around $27 billion in 2001.
Companies frequently turn to outsourcers to harness the tremendous power of spiraling IT technology and shape it into a tool for standardizing their information functions across business lines and geographic borders. Unfortunately, all too often they then tie the outsourcers’ hands by failing to establish standardization as a top priority within their enterprise.
All things are not equal. Never has that truth been more evident than in the challenges facing multinational corporations’ efforts to implement seamless network communication around the globe. The goal of providing and maintaining full capabilities to even the most remote production facility frequently slams into the reality of infrastructure inconsistencies across the company’s global footprint. At that point, many companies turn to outsourcers.
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